With its upcoming 20th anniversary, here's a look back at the internet-enabled hook that made 'The Blair Witch Project' a landmark in marketing, and lured moviegoers into thinking the fright flick might actually have been a documentary.
This week, 1999’s seminal found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project turns 20. To celebrate the milestone anniversary, we look back at the movie’s legendary viral-marketing campaign that sold The Blair Witch Project as the frightening filmed evidence left behind from a real-life supernatural encounter in the Maryland forest.
In 1999, a year after the movie’s Sundance Film Festival premiere, Artisan purchased the film for approximately $1 million and, with the aid of Myrick and Sánchez, promptly set about using the then-fledgling internet for a totally of-the-moment marketing campaign. Their strategy relied on oblique teases that revealed little about the film’s plot, all while providing copious tidbits about a “legend of the Blair Witch” in the Maryland woods .
Shrewdly, Artisan and the filmmakers kept this campaign low-profile, pushing it on the era’s online message boards and listing the actors on IMDb.com as missing real-life people. They eschewed a traditional trailer, instead debuting a few teases on college campuses and a faux-non-fiction TV special, Curse of the Blair Witch , on the Sci-Fi Channel.
In today’s online movie culture, The Blair Witch Project’s promos would have been pored over, dissected and debated ad nauseam — and its illegitimate claims almost certainly exposed — long before it reached multiplexes. Myrick and Sánchez’s film seized on the possibilities presented by a population just getting to know the internet, a time before ubiquitous spoilers zip around social media at every step of a movie’s production.
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